Posted by Razib Khan on March 28, 2007; This entry is filed under Uncategorized.

Several people have pointed me to the articles which quote a nationalist Japanese minister as stating, to the effect, that Arabs won’t trust blonde & blue-eyed Westerners, but have no historical aversion to East Asians. I found this kind of funny because of course the Sack of Baghdad was at the hands of the Mongols. Though the current post-colonial vogue is to attribute Arab failures to European exploitation, many scholars have long made the argument that the Mongol invasions dealt the Arabs a blow from which they never recovered (the Turks were ascendant from then on).1 It highlights the importance of history as propaganda and ideology to consider that the Crusades were relatively minor affairs compared to the later invasion of the Mongols, and yet the former loom far larger in the contemporary Arab mind.

1 – The Arab world had been in decline already during this period with the rise of Turkic warlords, but the Mongols snuffed out a late renaissance of the Caliphate in Baghdad.

Mongols victimized Chinese and Japanese too. It’s a silly argument overall, but Muslims have few or no beefs with Chinese or Japanese and haven’t seen Mongol invaders in 700+ years (Tamerlane was Turko-Persian though he opportunistically claimed Mongol ancestry).

Those damn liberals painting a huge target on the back of the west… /half serious

Would the colonized place such weight upon the injuries of colonialism if the west would flat out ignore those sentiments and laugh at them, instead of taking them seriously and having sympathetic political segments? Why would they use a victimization strategy that was noneffective?

I think that the Mongol damage was unevenly distributed. Eastern Iran was worst hit and may never have recovered. Central Asia was hit pretty hard, but recovered fully (Tamerlane, Ulugh Beg). Under the Mongols I think that Western Iran did OK, and there were some unprecedented things such as Rashid ad-din’s world history. By the end of the Mongol regime, though, orthodoxy was in control, and the Ottomans seem to have picked up on that.

The true victims of colonialism are the poor imperialist nations who gave so much and got nothing in return. They should be seeking reparations for the wrong done to them by these silly natives.

We rescued these noble savages from the darkness and introduced them to the light of civilzation and they spit it right back into our land grabbing, plantation owning, slave whipping, women raping, treaty breaking faces. Talk about ungreatful.

Perceptions of the past are defined by contemporary circumstances. Although the depradations of the European Crusaders pale in comparison to the cataclysm of Mongol invasion, the Mongols at present pose no threat to the Middle East or the Arab or Muslim world. Following their continent-spanning conquests, they (and the Turks) assimilated into the cultures of the nations they subdued – thus they posed no existential threat to the Muslim world following initial impact.

“We rescued these noble savages from the darkness and introduced them to the light of civilzation and they spit it right back into our land grabbing, plantation owning, slave whipping, women raping, treaty breaking faces. “

Well, the Arabs aren’t really *that* well-positioned to whine. Some arabs (I.e. non-saudi arabia) endured detached british and french semi-colonialism between 1920-1950 or so, replacing the Ottomans. Oh, and there’s that Israel thing…

To me if you want to determine the impact of colonialism you need to look at similar countries that were or were not colonized. In Asia you have Thailand, in Africa you have Ethiopia and Liberia (well, maybe Liberia doesn’t count). I’m not an expert but both countries seem to have wound up similar enough to their neighbors that I would not consider colonialism to be that big of a factor in the problems such states have today. India and South Africa are counter examples were there was a lot of nation-building done by the colonizers that still have visible effects today.